Old Boston, Uptown Birthers, Obama
I went up to Harlem yesterday to interview Mr. Maysles about his childhood as a Jew in Dorchester. The fact that there were any back in the day is probably surprising to non-Jewish Bostonians under 50 or so, or maybe just us coddled kids from the ring road region, less Bostonians than highway-eyed subjects of the Burger King.
The takeaway: to be a Jewish tween in Dot in the ’30s meant fighting an Irish kid almost every day. The interview wrapped up when Al had to take a phone call, something about Sunday dinner with Marcia Gay Harding + 1. I showed myself out.
On the street (Lenox + 125th), huge crowds were massing around aluminum pipe police barriers. West down 126th, TV vans had their satellite arms extended farther than I’d ever seen before, telescoping up 20, 30 feet, a weird grove trying to get a signal in a rarely newsworthy neighborhood.
Obama was coming, was word on the street, and the dignitary-grade police presence confirmed it. It wasn’t time to cordon off the four-square-block area yet, so cops were more just ambling than enforcing. One posse seemed to just be crossing Lenox every few minutes, shuffling like guys who don’t know anyone at a party, always just back or en route to the bathroom or the bar. The occasion was a $30,800-a-plate (or so I heard) benefit for Japan at the Red Rooster, some fancy place that looks relatively new to the neighborhood.
The crowd was mostly normal people, with a few army-fatigued guys just looking to film the thing thrown in the mix, but there was a strange Birther contingent picketing on the SW corner of the intersection.
Birthers are ubiquitous at almost any public gathering, just looking for any publicity to spread their truth, often sparring with 9/11 truthers in mutual indignation-and-condescension-offs, but these ones had signs I hadn’t seen before. On the backside of signs asking for birth certificates, they kept referring to Obama as the “long-legged mack daddy.”
So specific and weird an appellation for the President had to have a long-standing movement behind it—none except the giddily dumb punsters of Tea Party rallies, the same people who forward chain emails about what it’s like to be old, really make shit up for protest posters.
This looks like the origin, a pastor with a TV show who emphatically does NOT like Obama, going so far as to question what kind of mother could produce so long-legged a mack daddy. The best part of the video starts 4 minutes in, just skip ahead.
